Rot and Ruin
by Victorian Asylum
Summary: Shepard is aware that she cannot survive on tea and alcohol and ten minutes of rest. But she does not need to survive forever. / Set during ME3


Shepard knows this is unsustainable.

Her stint on the streets before falling under the sway of the Tenth Street Reds has taught her a thing or two about hunger. Alliance training was hard, and there were times she went with little food and sleep. Working her way through the N course, all the way through N7, was brutal. But it taught her the minimal amount of food and sleep needed to function. She often found herself scraping by, moments she thought there was no possible way to do this. But the Alliance had it down to a science, and hammered such knowledge into her head, cementing the truths of how little she needed to still retain humanity, still work.

And she is falling far beneath those levels.

Shepard is aware that she cannot survive on tea and alcohol and ten minutes of rest (if she's lucky). But she does not need to survive forever. Only until the Reapers are defeated. Then she can collapse into dust and bones, a mess of a ruined body worth billions of credits and technology. Until such a time, she will beat on. She has refused frequent stim use, only applies it for missions so she is at her pre-Reaper best, but it's getting harder and harder to get up every day. If she can push herself just a little more, run a little faster, stretch that rope ever farther...

One day the frayed string snaps.

It takes her twenty minutes to get out of bed that day, an ever increasing number. The very marrow of her bones protest, cry out with exertion. It's a war in and of itself to pull back the covers and sit up. She's sluggish, hardly in control of her own limbs, but slowly, she forces them into submission, and they reluctantly obey her, for the time being. Shepard shuffles to her shower as minutes pass. She can't lift her legs. But as she nears the stairs, everything collapses under the pressure, and her body gives up. The decent is in slowmotion, her vision dimming, but her arms don't obey when she wants them to brace. She vaguely registers her jaw colliding with the solid metal steps, and then, nothing.

When she awakens, fluorescent lights assault her eyes. Shepard is lying on one of the Medbay beds, a heart rate monitor steadily thrumming. She turns her head, ever so carefully, and looks at the screen monitoring her vitals, before turning her attention to the trail of tubes that ends in an I.V. in her arm. How long has she been out? Who has seen her like this? The crew, under no circumstance, is not allowed to see their Commander in such a state. Fainting in the middle of her cabin? Unacceptable. Shepard rips the I.V. out of her arm. Or, tries to. Her body is in the middle of a revolution, it seems, or a societal breakdown. No one seems to be answering her commands. What good is a 4 billion credit body with sybernetic implants if it's felled by starvation, stress and sleep deprivation?

The needle slides out slow and it's agony, the angle is all wrong, stabbing muscle and scraping veins as she plucks it from her skin. Shepard grits her teeth and manages to free it, before rolling off the bed. Her legs immediately buckle beneath her and she tries to grab hold of anything to keep upright. Her knees slam into the floor and things go crashing down around her. The simple exercise leaves her breathless.

"Commander!" Dr. Chakwas is by her in an instant, hauling her back up and sitting her down on the bed. Shepard has no energy left. She slumps over, hitting the bed with enough force to jar her shoulder. The world swims, and she wonders if she going to pass out again. Something pricks her arms, more fluids pumped through her veins to keep her alive. Dr. Chakwas is working rapidly, flitting about the place in carefully measured haste. Someone else is beside her, hands warm on her shoulder. The monitor slows, beeping leveling off. Shepard doesn't know how much times passes, if she's unconscious or spacing off. But Liara's worried face comes into view, and snaps her back to reality.

Shepard tries to sit up. "I have- I have to go."

"Shepard, lay down," Liara instructs, pushing her back towards the bed. "You need to rest.

Shepard refuses, but her strength is pitiful, and she is guided back down like a child. "The crew- they can't see me like this."

"Shepard, the Medbay is best equipped to get you back on track."

"Liara. They can't see me like this. I-I have to go somewhere else."

Liara shifts in her seat, looks over her shoulder, presumably to speak with Chakwas. Her attention occupied, Shepard attempts the exhausting effort of sitting up on her own. By the time she could be declared in a passively upright position, plans have been made and accepted, and Shepard is on her way to her cabin. An I.V. drip is jury rigged, given a makeshift stand to keep it up so it may remain bedside. Shepard wants to walk, she desperately does, but after seven failed attempts that end with bruised knees and exceptional knowledge of the floor, she concedes to help, and makes the short trip to the elevator resting heavily on Liara's side. Shepard sits on the floor for the short journey up, while Liara fixes her with a concerned stare.

Away from any crewmembers who may see, Shepard allows herself to be taken to bed with the help of biotics. Liara sets the I.V. line beside the bed, checks it over, before she rounds the edge of the bed and sits on the other side. "You should only need the I.V. for a day or two, while it returns vital nutrients to your body. After that, you can eat."

"I'm not hungry these days." Her more prominent cheek bones and protruding ribs are proof of that. Her body is no longer a well-maintained temple.

"It wasn't an offer." Liara says. "Shepard, you have to eat. You have to sleep. This is unsustainable."

"It only has to last a short while longer, Liara. Don't you see? It doesn't matter what happens to me. Life as we know it depends on us defeating the Reapers. I'll sleep when I'm dead."

"Shepard," Liara warns. The human expression is unacceptable. Not now that the woman has died once. That death looms ever closer as the reality of this war sets in like rain water slipping through cracked pavement.

The room is silent, save for the subtle hum of the fish tank. "I can't sleep." Shepard admits, but her chest doesn't feel any lighter. If anything, the weight has doubled.

"Why?" Liara asks, voice quiet.

Shepard swallows thickly. The admission is harder than she imagined it would be, the words trapped behind her teeth. She looks up at the stars slowly passing, and doesn't answer, trying to gather her words and her courage. It's a secret she's kept for a long time, one she'd hoped to hold onto forever. But her body has already betrayed her, her tongue likely to follow.

"Dr. Chakwas assumed as much," Liara says after minutes pass with no response. She reaches over Shepard and grabs a small bottle. "Here. You need to rest, these will help."

"No!" Shepard slaps the bottle from Liara's hand and it soars across the room, rolling under the stairs and disappearing. Liara recoils in shock. Shepard rarely yells, and she never screams at crewmembers. At her. Shepard clutches the bedsheets, chest heaving, and she looks so pitifully small, like she will shatter at any given moment and it tears Liara's heart. "I'm sorry." Shepard says, calmly this time, her voice hoarse and strained. "I can't. They'll hold me under."

Liara lays a tentative hand on Shepard's arm. Shepard is wound tight, muscles coiled springs beneath her skin. "Why are you so afraid to sleep?"

A muscle jumps in Shepard's cheek and she clenches her jaw, tries to bite back the words but they crawl up her throat and pry apart her teeth until there is no stopping them. "I keep relieving those moments. Before I die."

"Shepard..."

"Every time I close my eyes I'm there again, floating in space, the Normandy a wreck of fire and debris ahead of me. And I'm suffocating. Air is leaking from my suit and I'm dying. My throat seizes, my lungs are on fire and everything inside of me is being torn apart. It burns. I've swallowed liquid fire and it is burning me up from the inside, ignited. I clutch desperately at my neck, terrified. Spinning, drifting, slowly. And the entire world is silent, sound swallowed by the vacuums of space. And then its over. Everything is over." Shepard's knuckles are pale white from clutching the sheets, and panic has been growing inside her, the memories still vivid after nearly three years. "I wake up, sweating, clutching at my chest, tearing at my clothes because I can never breath. My body still thinks I've suffocated. I'm always terrified then, because I can never tell if the nightmare is still going until finally my lungs expand and I'm... alive."

Liara pulls Shepard to her, holds her close and Shepard curls into her side, face pressed against her stomach, the hard white material cold against her cheek. Shepard is crying, she realizes, the revelation jarring. Shepard is strong and steadfast, unwavering. She makes the hard choices, bears the lives of billions atop her shoulders, but she never seems to stumble. At least, not publicly. But this- this is like a child weeping for their mother, a father at the grave of his son. This is walking through the town you once called home, now reduced to ash and bodies. Seeing Shepard cry is a tragedy on the galaxy, and it tears Liara to pieces. So she holds her close, as gently as her mother once did for her, and does her best to retain all the pieces.

"I thought of you. At the end." Shepard admits, voice soft, almost non-existent in the quiet of the room. "Everything we did. Everything we've never done. Everything I'd never get to do with you. I still dream of you every time I close my eyes."

"Oh, Shepard, if I'd have-"

"No, please, I'm a bastard. I don't want to guilt trip you. I understand, completely. About you. Ash. Everyone that stayed away. What was a blink of an eye for me was an eternity for you. I couldn't accept the fact that everyone was slipping through my fingertips when you were actually cities away. Had been since the moment we re-met."

"But if I'd known such dream haunted you, I would have-" Liara grasps for words.

"There's nothing you could do."

"I could have talked to you more. Sent messages. Visited you."

Shepard shakes her head. "You'd moved on. You had a life without me. I shouldn't have tried to drag you back into my orbit. I could drown the dreams with enough alcohol, anyhow." She shifts, pulls at Liara's clothes, fingers hooking into grooves and buckles. "It was so peaceful after I died. I never knew what to except. But I can't even begin to to describe it. Everything simply ceased. My worries, dreams, future. I ceased to exist and I... I miss it." She's gone this far already. Torn open every healed scar, barred the sensitive muscle beneath. Now, it's easy to go just a little deeper, split the bone and draw out the marrow, the very core of all her troubles, anxiety and fear. "Some nights I miss it sorely. I sit in the shower and wish everything stops."

There are many things Liara desperately wants to say, but she knows Shepard has wrapped all these feelings up for so long, stored them in the farthest reaches of her mind. She needs to let this out, if only for Liara to begin to understand. "But there's so many lives counting on me. I'm drowning. And I know- I know there's a bright future ahead, after this. But I see their future!" Shepard pulls back, rests her hands on Liara's hips and she tries not to flinch, the full weight of her body painful. "I see their future. But I don't see mine. I don't know if I have one. I'm just surviving for them, breathing for them, fighting for them, bleeding for them. I wish they didn't need me. I wish I could... cease." Shepard leans away, runs her fingers along her jaw like she can rub the words away. "Sometimes I wish Cerberus never brought me back."

"Oh, Shepard," Liara begins, but she cannot find the words. Words cannot sooth such an aching soul. She knows these feelings are deep rooted, and trying to fix it would be throwing a cloth over a gaping wound and calling it a bandage.

"You have to promise me, Liara, that if at the end of all this, I don't make it through, you don't bring me back. You don't waste resources on me that should go to rebuilding. Okay? Just let me stop."

"Shepard..." Liara starts, unable to finish, to form a sentence coherent enough to convey her emotions. She knows Shepard desperately needs to release to pent up feelings that were eating away at her sanity, neuron by painfully overloaded neuron. The full weight of the situation is not lost on her. Shepard's trust can be a heavy burden to bear, especially on shoulders so unused to bowing beneath such things. This, however, was nothing she has ever prepared for. How could she have let this situation go unchecked for so long? Get to this abhorrent degree. The future was grungy, and dark. It was strained muscles, abrasions, broken bones and punctured skin. The future, for everyone, was staring Death defiantly in the face and waiting for judgment to be handed down upon them. But Liara had lost Shepard once. She did not wish to speak of the ever increasing possibility that she would lose the woman again.

"Liara, you must listen to me," Shepard begs, eyes desperate and pleading, so unlike her normal self it is jarring. "If I die, you must promise me you will let go of me." Her voice breaks, and it sounds like the decimation of an entire planet in a few ragged tones. She's staring, the look piercing in ways Liara never knew before, so disarming and terrible, all endless, stormy eyes and trembling brow.

"I promise." It's less of a sentence and more of a release, and slow sigh of words that hisses when they meet the air. Liara couldn't being to comprehend what Shepard had gone through, didn't pretend that she did. All that she understood was the gravity of the situation, and the simple fact that Shepard needed to cure herself of toxic thoughts, whether or not Liara wished to hear them.

If Shepard looks better, it was only a fraction so, near imperceptible to all but those who knew her best. The weight of the promise was bone breaking, but if she could take just a boulder off the mountain on Shepard's shoulders, Liara will gladly bear it. The conversation turns to ash after that, idle chatter back and forth until Shepard agrees to attempt sleep, so long as Liara remains. Shepard looks far more mortal now than she ever has before, stripped of her accomplishments, the embellishments, her status. Maybe that was all that she needed in this moment.

All things will end soon, and one way or another, Shepard will know peace once more.

**XXX**

**A/N:** Sometimes I wonder if all the things Shepard went through had more of an impact on her mental health than the game ever showed.


End file.
